A Chip of Glass Ruby

Catch a Fire

2006 · ★ 6.3

The true story of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, and particularly the life of Patrick Chamusso, a timid foreman at Secunda CTL, the largest synthetic fuel plant in the world. Patrick is wrongly accused, imprisoned and tortured for an attempt to bomb the plant, with the injustice transforming the apolitical worker into a radicalised insurgent, who then carries out his own successful sabotage mission.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

2005 · ★ 6.6

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

Yesterday

2004 · ★ 7.4

After falling ill, Yesterday learns that she is HIV positive. With her husband in denial and young daughter to tend to, Yesterday's one goal is to live long enough to see her child go to school.

Cry Freedom

1987 · ★ 7

A dramatic story, based on actual events, about the friendship between two men struggling against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s. Donald Woods is a white liberal journalist in South Africa who begins to follow the activities of Stephen Biko, a courageous and outspoken black anti-apartheid activist.

Niemandsland

Just after the Anglo-Boer War, a dispute arises when Ester returns home from a concentration camp only to find that her cousin and her English-speaking husband have moved into Ester's house.

Stander

2003 · ★ 6.2

The life and career of Andre Stander, a South African police officer turned bank robber.

Hansie

2008 · ★ 8

"How do you start over once you have betrayed a nation's trust?" The news of Hansie Cronjé's involvement with Indian bookmakers and his resulting public confession rocked the international sporting community. An unprecedented rise to glory was followed by the most horrific fall. A tarnished hero fueled the nation's fury.

Promised Land

2002 · ★ 7

A young, emigrated, South African man comes back to South Africa to sell his mothers farm.

The Long Run

2001 · ★ 6.7

A failed track coach finally finds someone who he believes has what it takes to win. The Comrades Marathon is a 90-k race in South Africa. An aging running coach, Barry, wants to field a winner; he's working with four men from a factory, but when he's fired to make way for a smooth, corporate type, he's at loose ends. Then he sees Christine, a Namibian immigrant who runs to forget her troubles. He offers to coach her and soon she's living at his house, following his diet and training regimen. But his single-mindedness gets to her: she wants a job and a place of her own. Plus, the man who replaced Barry likes her and wants her away from Barry. Can runner and coach (woman and man, African and European) sort out their complex relationship before the race? Written by

The Story of an African Farm

2004 · ★ 5.8

The 1870's. South Africa. Life is normal at the farm on the slopes of a Karoo Kopje.Things change when the sinister, eccentric Bonaparte Blenkins with bulbous nose and chimney pot hat arrives. Their childhood is disrupted by the bombastic Irishman who claims blood ties with Wellington and Queen Victoria and so gains uncanny influence over the girls' gross stupid stepmother.

Krotoa

2017 · ★ 5.9

Krotoa, a feisty, bright, 11-year-old girl is removed from her close-knit Khoi tribe to serve Jan van Riebeeck, her uncle’s trading partner and the first Governor of the Cape Colony. She is brought into the first Fort established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. There she grows into a visionary young woman who assimilates the Dutch language and culture so well that she rises to become an influential translator but ends up being rejected by her own people as she tries to bridge the gap between the two cultures about to collide.

Zulu

1964 · ★ 7.4

In 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War, man-of-the-people Lt. Chard and snooty Lt. Bromhead are in charge of defending the isolated and vastly outnumbered Natal outpost of Rorke's Drift from tribal hordes.